THE MEDIA EQUATION; TV Remote Moves Over For a Mouse

By DAVID CARR

Published: September 24, 2007

Media consumers have said, loudly and repeatedly, that they want to watch what they want, when and where they want it. Last week NBC called that bluff, saying that its prime-time broadcast schedule would be there for free downloading for a week after being shown on television.

In doing so, the network is leaving behind a business model that is as old as ''I Love Lucy'': audiences who make appointments with their favorite shows and who then show up in numbers that open up advertisers' wallets.

Instead, a historically passive medium that provided comfort and familiarity has been pushed into a new level of engagement by younger viewers and technological change. Consumers are surrounded with choices like downloads, streams and digital recordings, yielding a customizable media universe that may mean the new mass audience is really a series of niche ones.

With a new fall season getting under way, will audiences leave behind the tyranny of the broadcast schedule and make up their own fall television schedule by downloading? And if they choose the mouse, what do we talk about around the water cooler the next day at work?

A conversation that had historically been about who shot J.R. -- or the ''Friends'' final episode or the first season of ''Survivor'' -- may be replaced with pleas not to blurt out spoilers for content that is still sitting on a hard drive or TiVo, waiting to be watched.

''Consumers not only want to control the medium, but they want to do it as easily as possible,'' said Tim Bajarin, an analyst at Creative Strategies in California.

Intrigued by ''K-Ville,'' the post-Katrina cop show, tomorrow night on Fox? Why wait? It's already free on iTunes. Sorry you missed NBC's ''Friday Night Lights'' last year? The first show of the new season is still sitting on Yahoo. Wondering what all the fuss is about with ''Gossip Girls''? AOL's got your back.

''I need network advertising, so I am happy for it to thrive. I think much of this has been good for networks,'' said Andrew Donchin, the director of national broadcast at Carat North America, which buys advertising. ''Digital technologies allow people to sample some shows and catch up with others in way that they never could before.''

Network television had been the ultimate example of a so-called push business, once supported by heavy promotion, big fall lineups and an endless search for popular prime-time attractions like ''American Idol.'' It is increasingly relying instead on pull, in which consumers assemble precisely what they want to watch -- and nothing else.

NBC's download strategy, called NBC Direct, feeds that desire, but comes on the heels of the network's decision not to do business with iTunes, which was partly driven by the continued insistence of Apple's chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, on a universal price of $1.99 a show.

In his ability to dictate terms, Mr. Jobs resembles David Sarnoff, the broadcasting pioneer who used market leverage to create common standards in the infancy of the television industry. Two years ago, networks started doing business with iTunes in an effort to avoid the fate of their brethren in the music business.

But for some of those companies, what looked like a bridge to the future has come to seem like a gangplank.

NBC, for instance, appears to believe that Mr. Jobs is using their lovingly produced content as a kind of cheap, ubiquitous software to sell his iPod devices. But in its attempt to counterprogram iTunes, NBC finds itself facing down the millions of iPods already in the hands of consumers and, perhaps more important, a simple, easy way to get their hands on television shows that in some ways mirrors the old watching experience.

''In a way, iTunes is very much like Google,'' said John Rash, an advertising executive at the Campbell Mithun agency. ''It has the universality of Google for its specific application. And it almost always works in getting you what you want.''

So although NBC has, by some measures, 40 percent of the sales of television programming on iTunes, Fox, CBS and ABC are not only continuing to work with the company, but in some cases are using the service to give consumers free early peeks at their fall lineup.

NBC Direct may seem like a bold leap into the future, but it is actually a replication of the broadcast model in a digital realm. The service is built on timely, free, ad-supported programming broadcast to a self-selecting audience, which is a network model whether it is being controlled by a remote or a mouse. And lest people think that NBC has proposed something visionary, keep in mind that in 2008 it will roll out ad-free pay-to-own content with a secure credit card service, something that iTunes mastered two years and 100 million downloaded programs ago.

There are cultural advantages to the current complicated world of options. In times past, ''Heroes,'' one of last season's big success stories, would have left many of us behind, and the same goes for the long, seasonal arcs of ''24'' and ''Lost.'' Digital technologies may have been seriously disruptive, but they have enabled networks to aggregate large audiences over time through viral, not broadcast, means.

But what about the rest of us, who just want to sit down on the couch and make like a Yukon Gold in front of whatever happens to be on the screen? As the amount of media has piled up in our lives (not to mention e-mail, mobile calls and text messages), consumers are bound to feel overwhelmed. The TV season is never over -- it beckons from the hard drive and the Web, telling us there is still more to catch up on, joining a digital nightstand that is groaning with neglected Netflix movies and unwatched recorded shows.

Do we want more media enough to take the mouse in hand and download programming through proprietary software at NBC? It all sounds like a lot of work, which seems antithetical to the core idea of watching television.

''There is a negative consequence to this much consumer freedom,'' said Barry Schwartz, the author of ''The Paradox of Choice.'' ''There is an erosion in the shared human experience. There is not much to talk about at work the next day because there is no reason to think that people have seen the same thing the day before. Maybe people will only go to the water cooler to get water.''